At this point in the election cycle, I'm generally pacing up and down, and back and forth, spending hours talking about politics (I got a call from Moveon.org today with a request to volunteer this weekend) and then surfing political blogs to find out the latest tidbit of news on what will happen to America over the next four years once we know who our president will be and the direction our country will inevitably go.
The website that crunches every number in sight is FiveThirtyEight.com. The site's authors and contributors, Nate Silver and Sean Quinn, pour over statistics and polls done by the major U.S. Polling Agencies, from Zogby to AP to Gallup. They crunch the numbers from a variety of polls, whose methods are sometimes interesting and strange. For example: say you're 20 and haven't voted before in a presidential election. In some traditional poll models, you might be excluded from the data because you don't have a track record. In this upcoming election, polls like that would exclude millions of new registered voters, 350,000 alone who were registered in Virginia between January 1 and October 1 (this excludes all those last-minuters who turned in forms in the wee hours of October 5th or 6th, the last days to offically register) (Raising Kane, 2008).
What's so great about this poll projections website is the vast amount of data that one can pour over: what are Virginia's numbers? With 13 electoral votes, we're holding at 95% odds to swing to Obama, 5% to McCain, say Silver and Quinn. But those numbers, like the polls themselves, update daily, sometimes several times a day. It all depends on who picks up the phone. And for most of us who predominantly use cell phones as our only phone, it won't be us that they call. My sister, who has a landline and lives in Gainesville, has gotten, at last count, 13 polling calls. I've gotten none. Check out this great article highlighting some interesting statistics on cell-only users at Politics and Technology. The thing to pay attention to is what will happen to polling in the future: more and more people are dropping land phone service and are moving to cell-only service. And because it a federal (FCC) law that doesn't allow solicitation on cell phones, we generally get polling peace and quiet. This quiet will eventually skew phone polls unless the federal laws are updated.
Of course, I can't tell you in one short blog everything you would want to know about presidental voting polls. But I can tell you that sites like DailyKos.com, who prominently display daily tracking poll numbers (today it's Obama 51%, McCain 40%) do draw my attention. And that's no surprise: in the land of the 59 cent burrito and "Zero Money Down" on a house or car, it seems as if America has a love affair with numbers of the right variety. It also just so happens that because I have already voted for Obama (no secret there), I have to say that I'm pretty pleased about how these numbers are tracking. But then again, they'll have to hold for 8 more days. And crazier things have happened.
Reference Cited
Raising Kaine PAC. (2008). 350,000 New Registered Voters in Virginia Since January 1, 2008! Retrieved October 26, 2008, from http://www.raisingkaine.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=16521
